South likes: Erika Verzutti at Peter Kilchmann, Zurich

South likes: Erika Verzutti at Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Painted Ladies
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
14 June – 19 July, 2014

Text by Michelangelo Corsaro

Always on the edge between abstract and figurative forms, the Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti exhibits at Galerie Peter Kilchmann for the first time in a solo show. Shaped in the organic forms of fruits or animals, her works display something of a totemic power. Be it the opalescent form of a peacock or a cluster of bananas, the energy or rather the irony of these works transcends their formal or material features approaching the familiarity of the everyday experience of objects. It could be otherwise said that through our everyday fruit bowl experience, Verzutti gives us snapshots of an exotic alter reality, made strange by the process of casting them together into anthropomorphic or animal forms. There is undoubtably an uncanny exoticism in the way these mundane forms are conceived: in the wall- sculpture Gravid the round shape of a fruit can easily allude to the human form of a pregnant belly, highlighting a primal connection to the notion of fertility and the bounty of the earth, ripe bellies and breasts bulging. The majestic posture of a peacock is translated, with analogous simplicity, in the iridescent materiality of spray-painted papier mache. Due to their humorous character, these works are pervaded with the seductive promiscuity of a tropical mix between categories of objects and beings. Following a tradition of Brazilian formalism, Verzutti elaborates a very personal idiom where the language of art and the one of reality are deeply entrenched in a sensual and unpredictable discourse.

http://www.peterkilchmann.com/exhibitions/current/